LESSON TWO : WORD STRUCTURE.

L3S5 Dr Ibrahima ABDOULAYE

Plan of the lesson :

1. Introduction

2. Morphological Structure of words

3. Structural types and classes of words

1. Introduction

Marantz (1992) posits that grammar is blind to concepts, and cannot therefore be invoked to
explain formal properties of language.

Consequently, the only level able to explain why a word is included in a particular grammatical
category is the morphosyntactic level.

Moreover, this theory predicts that the morphosyntactic operations must be able to explain the
categorization of a word.

This lesson is part of lexical morphosyntax.

Lexical morphosyntax is about morphosyntactic operations words undergo in a language system.

The lesson will describe the structural forms in a word.

Key-words:

• Word,

• morpheme,

• lexeme, word-form

• word-root, stem, affix,

• monomorphic word, polymorphic word,

• content word, function word.

2. Morphological structure of a word

Morphology is one of the branches of linguistics in which we study about the structure of words.

Morphology differs from lexicology, which is the study of the form and meaning of words and how
they make up a language's vocabulary.

The morphological structure of words is the structure which consists of the elements to form words.

The structure of a word could be roughly explained as the internal arrangement of different
units/parts in the given word.

2.1. What is a word?

Language has over 450,000 entries. Most speakers don’t know all these words.

Thus, what is a word?

A word is a particular string of sounds united with a meaning in our mental dictionaries.
Once you learn both the sounds and their related meaning, you know the word.

It becomes an entry in your mental lexicon (the Greek word for dictionary), part of your linguistic
knowledge.

This shows that in a particular language, the form (sounds or pronunciation) and the meaning of a
word are like two sides of a coin.

A word is the main lexical unit of a language resulting from the association of a group of sounds with
a meaning.

To be clear, a word is not the smallest unit of the language, but the smallest part of a sentence that
can be said alone and still retain its meaning. It consists of morphemes.

The word is therefore a structural and semantic entity within the language system.

Since each word is a sound-meaning unit, each word stored in our mental lexicon must be listed with
its unique phonological representation, which determines its pronunciation, and its meaning.

For literate speakers, the spelling, or orthography, of most of the words we know is included in this
representation.

2.2. Roots

A root is an absolute item. Each word has one root and this root remains the same regardless of
what affixes are added.

Roots (or bases) are the morphemes that carry the principal concept, idea, or meaning in a word.

They generally constitute the nuclei or core of words.

Roots can be classified free or bound morphemes.

1. When roots are free morphemes, they constitute content and function words by
themselves, such as:

• book, dog, house, carry, quick, early, etc.

• Free morphemes are roots can stand alone (car, teach, tall).

2. When roots are bound morphemes, they form parts of words, as:

• -ceive in perceive, -tain in attain, -sume in presume, etc.

• So, a root is a form that represents the basic lexical content of a word but may not be a
word in itself.

2.3. Stems

A stem is a relative item.

what the stem is, is relative to the affix being discussed. A word can have several stems; for
example:

• in foolishness, we have 2 stems, fool and foolish:

1. if the affix is -ish, the stem is fool,

2. and if the affix is -ness, the stem is foolish.

Stems are free roots that remain unchanged and to which grammatical inflexions and derivational
affixes are added. In this sense, a stem has minimally ONE root but is analysable into:

a) a stem = a root: (fish, place) ;

b) a stem = a root + one or more derivational morphemes : (construct, destruct, comfortable,
uncomfortable, uncountableness)

It is the basic unit at the derivational level, taking the inflections which shape the word
grammatically as a part of speech.

For example, in the word disestablishment, disestablish, establishment, and establish (which is a
root at the same time) are stems.

Notice that stems are words without inflectional morphemes:

• Establishments, he establishes.

There are three types of stems: simple, derived and compound:

1. Simple stems are generally monomorphic and phonetically identical with the root
morphemes (sell, grow, pocket, motion, receive, etc.).

2. Derived stems are built on stems of various structures. Derived stems are mostly
polymorphic (e.g. governments, unbelievable, etc.).

3. Compound stems are made up of two immediate constituents, both of which are
themselves stems, e.g. match-box, pen-holder, ex-film-star, etc. It is built by joining two
stems, one of which is simple, the other is derived.

2.4. Lexemes and word-forms

Lexemes are the vocabulary items that are listed in the dictionary.

According to the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2007) second edition:

a lexeme is a word or group of words that has a meaning that cannot be understood from the
meaning of the parts of which it consists.

• For example the words “go” and “went” are different word forms which realize a single
lexeme “GO”.

• Another example: cook and cooks are different word-forms which belong to the same
lexeme “COOK”..

In this sense, see, sees, seeing, saw and seen are five different word-forms but belonging to the
same lexeme SEE (lexemes are written in capital letters).

The word-forms “perplexity”, “perplexed” and “perplexing” are different realizations (or
representations or manifestations) of the lexeme PERPLEX.

So, lexemes and word-forms share a core meaning although they are spelled and pronounced
differently.

It is clear that the word-forms are realizations of the lexemes:

• SEE: see, sees, seeing, saw, seen.

 • SLEEP: sleep, sleeps, sleeping, slept.

• CATCH: catch, catches, catching, caught.

• JUMP: jump, jumps, jumped, jumping.

• TALL: tall, taller, tallest.

• BOY: boy, boys.

• WOMAN: woman, women.

2.5. Morphemes

By definition, a morpheme cannot be decomposed into smaller units.

In short, the term morpheme is used to refer to the smallest, indivisible units of semantic content
(which words are made up of), or grammatical function (like singular or plural number in the noun).

A morpheme – the minimal linguistic unit – is thus an arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning.

This may be too simple a definition, but it will serve our purposes for now.

In all languages:

• sound units combine to form morphemes,

• morphemes combine to form words, and

• words combine to form larger units – phrases, clauses and sentences.

• The decomposition of words into morphemes illustrates one of the fundamental properties
of human language – discreteness.

Structurally, every word comprises one or more morphemes:

• sing-er-s,

• home-work,

• un-kind-ly,

• flipp-ed,

• de-nation-al-iz-ation.

So, a morpheme is a group of sounds that refers to a particular object, idea, or action.

2.6. Classification of morphemes

A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has meaning or a grammatical function.

In this respest, a morpheme is not identical to a word,

The principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas
a word, by definition, is freestanding.

1. When a morpheme stands by itself, it is a free morpheme which is considered as a root

because it has a meaning of its own (the morpheme cat).
2. When it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is a bound morpheme (or an affix)
because it has a grammatical function, (–s in cats indicates plural). Other examples:

• car-s ,

• re-consider,

• over-general-iz-ation.

Every morpheme can be classified as either:

 Free morpheme or root-morpheme

 Bound morpheme or affixational morpheme.

a) Free morphemes (or root–morphemes):

A morpheme which may occur in isolation and functions as an independent word. Example: pay,
sum, form.

It is a unit of meaning that may stand alone as a word.

Free morphemes can function independently as words (town, dog) and can appear with other
lexemes (town hall, doghouse).

The root morpheme is the lexical center of the word.

b) Bound morpheme (or affixational morphemes) :

It is a unit of meaning that must be associated with another, for example (-er, un-, -less, -able).

Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes
with other bound morphemes.

• For example, un- appears only accompanied by other morphemes to form a word
(unacceptable).

Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes.

• Examples of suffixes are -tion, -ation, -ible, -ing, etc.

Bound morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes (meaningless morphemes)
for example: Competitive (formed from compete with the suffix –ive).

Bound morphemes also can be further classified as: derivational or inflectional.

 Derivational morpheme

A derivational morpheme is an affixational morpheme which modifies the lexical meaning of the
root or part of speech of the affected word, and forms a new word.

• In many cases it adds the part-of-speech meaning to the root:

1. management,

2. encourage,

3. fruitful.
For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy
changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness).

In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word
formed by the root kind.

Generally, the affixes used with root-words are the bound morphemes.

 Inflectional morpheme

An inflectional morpheme is an affixational morpheme which carries only grammatical meaning

relevant only for the formation of word-forms.

• For example: books, opened, strong-er. (see next lesson for more details)

1.7. Morphs

Morphs are segments of a phonological unit. For example, in the word “unacceptable”, the
segments Un- and –able are called morphs and mean something:

“Un” negative ; “able” = adjective means ‘it is possible’, while “accept” = lexeme

1.8. Allomorphs

Some morphemes can be realized in more than one way, i.e. a morpheme can have different forms in
different environments.

The variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs.

• Examples: 1. dog-[z] 2. cat-[s] 3. bush-[iz]

Allomorphs are variants of the same morpheme which have the same function but different forms.

Unlike the synonyms, they usually cannot be replaced one by the other.

• Let us consider the allomorphs of the English regular past tense morpheme below:

a. /id/ if the verb ends in /d/ or /t/ for instance:

• ‘mend’ ‘mended’ /mend/ /mendi:d/, ‘paint’ ‘painted’ /peint/ /peinti:d/

b. /d/ after a verb ending in any voiced sound except/d/ for instance:

• ‘clean’ ‘cleaned’ /kli:n/ /kli:nd/ , ‘weigh’ ‘weighed’ /wei/ /weid/

c. /t/ after a verb ending in any voiceless consonant other than /t/ for instance:

‘park’ ‘parked’ /pa:k/ /pa:kt/, ‘miss’ ‘missed’ /mis/ /mist/

It is clear that the distribution of allomorphs is phonologically conditioned:

• /i:d/ is chosen after alveolar stops /d/ or /t/.

• /d/ is chosen after voiced segments other than/d/ (with /i/ being inserted to
separate the alveolar stop of the suffix from the final alveolar stop of the verb to
which it is attached: ‘clean’ ‘cleaned’).

• /t/ is chosen after voiceless consonants other than/t/.

So far, all the examples of morphs that we have seen have involved only vowels and consonants.
We can say that /id/, /d/ and /t/ are English morphs, and we can group all these three morphs
together as allomorphs of the past tense morpheme.

The form of a morpheme is based on its pronunciation, i.e. the spelling is irrelevant.

2. Types and classes of words

All English words are classified into structural types and word classes.

3.1. Structural types of words:

Considering the morphemic structure of words and the processes of their formation, there are 4
structural types of words in English :

1) simple words: These are single-root morphemes (agree, child, red, etc.);

2) derivatives (or affixational derived words): consisting of one or more affixes : enjoyable,
childhood, unbelievable.

Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary.

This type is widely represented by a great number of words belonging to the original English stock or
to earlier borrowings (house, room, book, work, port, street, table, etc.). In Modern English, it has
been greatly enlarged by the type of word-building called conversion (see lesson 4).

3) compound words: consisting of two or more stems (dining-room, bluebell, mother-in-law, good-
for-nothing, etc.). Words of this structural type are produced by the word-building process called
composition (see lesson 4).

4) derivational compounds: in which phrase components are joined together by means of

compounding and affixation:

• oval-shaped

• strong-willed.

Accordingly, we can also distinguish monomorphic words and polymorphic words:

1. Monomorphic words are root-words consisting of only one root-morpheme, for example,
simple words like (dry, grow, boss, sell).

2. Polymorphic words are words consisting of at least one root-morpheme and a number of
derivational affixes, for example, derivatives, compounds (customer, payee, body-building,
shipping).

3.2. Classes of words:

Each word in your mental lexicon includes other information such as whether it is a noun, a pronoun,
a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition, or a conjunction.

That is, its grammatical category, or syntactic class, is specified. If such information were not in the
mental lexicon, we would not know how to form grammatical sentences, nor would we be able to
distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences.

Coming back to the issue of classification of words, all English words fall into two large classes or
categories: Content words and Function words.
 3.2.1. Content words

Content words or lexical morphemes (or lexical items) are words that have semantic content (or
meaning) and usually refer to a thing, quality, state or action.

In a language, these morphemes generally take the forms of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs
(for instance : dog, Peter, house, build, stay, happy, intelligent, quickly, always).

Actually, lexical morphemes constitute the larger class of morphemes.

Content words constitute the major part of the vocabulary of a language.

They form the open class of words (or content words) in a language, a class of words likely to grow
due to the incorporation of new members into it.

3.2.2. Function words

Function words are function or grammatical free morphemes which have little or no clear lexical
meaning on their own, but have a grammatical function which shows morphosyntactic relationships
in and between sentences.

In a language, these free morphemes are represented by prepositions, conjunctions, articles,

pronouns, demonstratives, auxiliary verbs (referred to as open complementizers),

• For instance : it, and, on, of, the, with, but, this, can, who, me….

References

Katamba, Francis. (1993). Modern Linguistics Morphology. London: MacKay’s of Chatham PLC.

Marius, Richard and S. Wiener, Harvey. (1985). The McGraw-Hill College Handbook. USA: Kingsport
Press, Inc.

Stephen Kucer and Cecilia Silva. (2006). Teaching the Dimensions of Literacy. New York: Routledge.

Wren, P.C and Martin, H. (2006). High School English Grammar & Composition. India: S Chand &
Company LTD.

Spencer, Andrew (1992). Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell

Kemmer, Suzanne. "Words in English: Structure". Retrieved 10 April 2014.

Davletbaeva, DN (2010). Lectures on English Lexicology. Курс лекций по лексикологии

английского языка. Учебное пособие для студентов иностранных языков. – Казань: ТГГПУ, 2010
- 92 с. доцент Давлетбаева Д.Н.

Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners CD-ROM 2nd Edition. CD-ROM © Macmillan
Publishers Limited 2007. Text © A&C Black Publishers Ltd 2007.

• http://fis.ucalgary.ca/RF/GRContentWords-StructureWords.html

• http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/contentwordterm.htm

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_word

Thank you. See you next lesson